McCaw was born in
Daly City, California, in 1971. Growing up, he was part of the Daly City punk/skateboarding scene in the 1980s. He has a
BFA from the
Academy of Art College in San Francisco. McCaw is known for his large-format homemade cameras in which he uses expired
gelatin silver photo paper and long exposures to make
solarized paper negatives which often include the burned path of the sun within the frame, in a series named
Sunburn. McCaw travels to remote places to capture different apparent movements of the sun, including the
Arctic Circle in
Alaska, the
Galápagos Islands and the
Mojave Desert. McCaw's earlier work used a 7×17 inch
view camera to create large-format negatives from which he made
platinum prints. Projects following
Sunburn include work with a modified
Cirkut camera, resulting in exposures that can take more than 24 hours. A series titled
Poli-optic employs a homemade camera with a grid of lenses. Finally, the series
Heliograph includes work in which there are multiple exposures of the sun on the same paper negative.
Sunburn McCaw's best known project is titled
Sunburn. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art writes about the series that: In 2003 McCaw, a photographer based in San Francisco, began taking pictures of the sun. Using large-format cameras that he builds himself, McCaw works outdoors, usually in the desert or by the sea. Instead of film, he places photographic paper in the camera so that each picture he creates is a unique paper negative. His exposures often last four hours or more. McCaw calls these works "Sunburns" because the rays of the sun, magnified by the camera's lens, actually scorch the paper negative, sometimes burning all the way through the paper base. The intensity of the light also causes solarization, reversing the tonal values so that the negative print appears as a positive image. == Publications ==